Coffee aroma relieves stress?
A recent report on ABC news reported that just the smell of coffee can relieve stress.
I wonder if that is the reason why I cannot go 20 feet at my current place of employment without seeing, or at least smelling coffee brewing. Unfortunately, it isn't good coffee. It is a pre-packaged name-brand product designed to just open up, dump into the coffee filter and hit start on the Bunn machine to brew a perfectly good pot of coffee.
There are a couple of problems with this product. For starters, these convenient little packages of sunshine are ordered in bulk from Office Max and is delivered in several large cases at a time. This makes me wonder exactly how old the coffee is by the time the last little packet is opened and more is ordered.
Second, most of the employees I have overheard complain that one of these packets don't contain enough coffee to actually produce the intended results (keeping us from drooling into our government-issued keyboards while we try not to nod off to sleep). The result is brown water with little flavor. On cold mornings (which are few and far between here) the only benefit to this is that we have hot liquid to drink.
Now, being a new employee, I do not dare complain about anything, much less gripe about the less than stellar coffee.....but I can passive agressively combat the situation! On mornings when I am the first to arrive at the nearest coffee machine I not only put in one packet...but two. Apparently, doubling the coffee packets has not gone unnoticed. I have heard comments that range from, "wow, the coffee is good today," to "we'd better have someone look at that coffee machine...I think something is wrong with it."
Getting back to the news article on the smell of caffeine improving mood in the workplace, I wonder...if a double dose of coffee packets improves the taste of our traditionally brown water, will it also increase the mood altering-effect? Will people be twice as happy? If so, there are some people I believe should have a coffee maker at their desk.
On the other hand, what if the coffee aroma just elevates whatever mood the person happens to be in. This could be bad news for the office pessimist and everyone he or she works with. (This reminds me of an old Bill Cosby joke in which someone tells him how wonderful cocaine is because it heightens a person's personality...to which Cosby replies "yes, but what if that person is an A$$ Hole?")
What about your office? Does the number of coffee makers seem to correlate with the atmosphere of the office? Tell me about it. AND, if you have a happy work envronment, what kind of coffee do you brew there? I'd love to hear about it.
Oh, by the way, for full disclosure...that study about coffee and stress was performed on rats in South Korea. Some people may not see a discernable difference between cubicle dwellers and rats in South Korea.
Oh, by the way, for full disclosure...that study about coffee and stress was performed on rats in South Korea. Some people may not see a discernable difference between cubicle dwellers and rats in South Korea.
Are you sure we don't work at the same place?? I'm not sure if the smell of coffee reduces stress in my section of our plant, but it certainly works on me. Even if it's really bad Farmers Brothers coffee. Ick.
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Hmmm... sounds to me like you need a Keurig brewer in your workplace. I'm in love with these machines, for work and home, can't get enough. They have over 200 varieties of coffee, tea and cocoa. There’s no waste or clean up. On site, fresh brewed cup always available saves you the trip to DnD or Starbucks for a fresh cup of coffee. And it’s convenient and easy to use.
Check it out: www.keurig.com/aw
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